We're working through the problems a bunch of problems with the contributed
plugins that have been sitting around for some time. This includes assigning
licenses to all the plugins, adding version/author information, making sure
they have some modicum of documentation, and at some point (hopefully)
testing them all out in PyBlosxom 1.2. Hopefully this will put the contributed
plugin pack in a much better state of being.

Steven, Bill, Wari, and Doug decided that it was high time we started using
various features of CVS to make development better. I've had some growing
pains with this and kind of wished people had figured things out and written
up a process before making the changes. Even though I'm grumbling about the
way it's happened, it is a good thing it is happening and it will make it
a lot easier to do some of the things we've been doing for a while now. It'll
also help a huge amount now that we've got more than one or two active
developers.

I have a lot of plans for the PyBlosxom manual, but haven't had time to execute
on any of them yet. The wiki we were storing documentation in was taken down
since the jackass ISP that Wari had got all befuddled and confused and terminated
his account with them. The problem here is that I had documentation in the wiki
I hadn't had time to port to the manual yet. Fortunately, Wari sent me the
contents of the wiki. I had documentation in there that I hadn't had time to
port to the manual yet.

I'm 90% sure I know how to restructure what we've got right now to allow for
Bill's index caching and also other storage systems. Depending on how things
go with everyone else's PyBlosxom projects, I'll prototype this, write up
a specification, send it round, and then implement the resulting modifications
all before the next version of PyBlosxom.

Since Ted's PyBlosxom presentation at PyCon 2005, we've had 10-20x as much
PyBlosxom development activity. That's been really exciting but also really
daunting. Definitely a lot of growing pains mostly between my style of
running things and peoples' vision for how things should be run.

Steven is still working on fixing the PyBlosxom registry to be a bit more
user-friendly. We're short on flavour templates and some people really
dislike this so I want to spend a week building new flavours at some point
in the near future. Maybe I'll toss all the flavours in the contributed
plugin pack to replace the existing flavour examples that come with it
(I highly doubt anyone uses any of them).

Getting there....

grad school

I was accepted into the masters program at Northeastern University CCS.
Starting in September, I'll be a full time grad student. My advisor is
Mitch Wand (which is very exciting) and I was awarded a Dean's List
Scholarship which reduces the costs assuming I maintain a 3.0 GPA and
miscellaneous other things in fine print. All very exciting.

Need to learn Lisp, review all the stuff I learned in college, and attempt
to get ahead of the game by covering as many of the things I'm going to
be learning as possible.

DarkRifts

I've adjusted the way I'm working on DarkRifts such that I'm limiting
myself to one coding goal every week. This will reduce the amount of
stuff I'm doing there, but more importantly, it makes it easier to schedule
things and gives me time to work on all the other non-DarkRifts stuff
out there.

My book(s)

I'm in the process of looking at Lulu
to do some self-publishing. S and I wrote a children's book last year
which might be a good candidate for Lulu. The problem being that we'd need
to redo the layout.

On top of that, I'm novel-izing the D&D campaign that I've been in for a
year and a half. That's been going really well so far. I'm done the
first couple of chapters. If anyone else plans to do something like this,
it helps to take really good session notes and maintain a public set of
summaries that other people in the campaign can fix.

On top of that, S and I have some ideas on the next children's book,
but we still need to sit down and flesh them out a bit.

Other

Work has been super busy the last couple of weeks on top of everything
else.

And I started running again and I finally got around to cutting my hair,
too.

Seems like it's ok so far. So I released it rather than continuing to
sit on it. I've done a lot of work on the manual to cover the areas
that were covered poorly or not covered at all. There's still a lot
of material to cover, but we're definitely making measurable progress
in that direction.

Steven Armstrong did a lot of work to get mod_python, WSGI, and Twisted
supported. I'm not sure why anyone would use WSGI or Twisted, though,
since they don't appear to make much difference in how fast PyBlosxom
works. mod_python definitely helps, though. Steven has some runtime
statistics
here.

This feels like a good release. We met some goals, we didn't sit on it
forever, the documentation is an order of magnitude better than it was
for the previous version (though it has a long way to go, still), and we
fixed a bunch of bugs.

Having said that, it's definitely not necessary for people to upgrade.
I think if your blog works and you don't need to futz with it to get
additional functionality, leave well enough alone.

I'm almost done the next version of the PyBlosxom manual. At the suggestion
of Steven, I converted the manual thus far from html to docbook. I still
need to do a lot of work in terms of indexing and adding warnings and notes
and various other indicators like that. I'm busy re-writing chapters to
reflect issues people are having on the pyblosxom-users list.

I think I've worked between 20 and 30 hours on it over the last week
and a half--it's almost like another part time job.

Back in 1998, I bought a Dell Inspiron 7000 PII 266mhz monstrocity
of a laptop which weighs in at over 8 lbs. It's really heavy. It's
seen its fair share of action since then: it was toted back and forth
between MA and CT while I was doing consulting work; it was abused by
an x-girlfriend; it was shipped in a flimsy letter-sized envelope thing
via USPS; and then it's been through several moves since I move on average
once every 8 months. It's been through a lot.

The case is cracked, the things that latch the lid shut are broken, and
the power adapter has been fixed a few times (the last one by Brian who
had the right tools to fix it and thus it's been fine since [Thanks, Brian!]).
Even so, I powered it up last night, did an apt-get update;apt-get
dist-upgrade and it's going fine. Slow, but fine.

So this post is in homage to a laptop I bought back in 1998 that's stuck
with me through thin and thick and is still usable even after all these
years.

We're going to try to push out PyBlosxom 1.2 in the next week or two.
Steven did a lot of work fixing up static rendering and also fixing
the architecture pieces that caused PyBlosxom to kind of suck when
used in various frameworks like WSGI, Twisted and mod_python. I'm
also going to do another round of documentation content.

We're going to push fixing the file handling to the next version.
We want to allow for index caching and also reduce the number of times
PyBlosxom walks your blogdir for entries. Both of these new abilities
will significantly reduce the time it takes for large blogs to
render. Getting there....

I need an external HDD enclosure so that I can [fill in obvious use cases
here]. I have a couple of 3.5" drives that I'm not using, so that eliminates
a 2.5" enclosure that can power off USB which is a bit of a shame.